About six years ago we bought a "state of the art" video camera for our honeymoon to Greece. Today, said camera records tape noises and is jumpy. It takes forever to download a video and we haven't done anything with them. We needed a new solution. We have been eying up the Flip camera for a while, so when I saw that it was on sale at Best Buy we decided to go for it. It takes AA batteries (no worrying about charging a battery!), is very light weight and easy to use. It's not a detailed camera so if you are looking for high quality video and zoom, this isn't the camera for you. But for us, to just record some of the kids shenanigans, edit and upload quickly--this works! Here are some of the videos from playing around with it today: